OpenSignal Report Claims Navi Mumbai Leads in 4G Download Speeds Across India

Amid growing 4G penetration in India, Navi Mumbai scored an impressive 8.1Mbps in average LTE download speed to top 4G download speeds across 20 cities in India, while Allahabad grabbed the last spot with an average of 4Mbps speed, London-based wireless coverage mapping company OpenSignal said on Wednesday.

According to the company, at 4am smartphone users in 20 cities across India experienced average download speeds of 16.8Mbps, compared with the daily average of 6.5Mbps. Thus download speeds are up to 4.5 times faster at night, when comparing the fastest average speed of 16.8Mbps at 4am to the slowest average speed of 3.7Mbps at 10pm.

"India's smartphone users experience varying 4G download speeds depending on the city they live in. Navi Mumbai led our 20 cities' ranking with double the speed of Allahabad, which came last. 

"Hyderabad has the most consistent speeds and Allahabad has the highest variance. In all cities, 4G download speeds changed considerably at different hours of the day, the average download speeds being at 4.5 times faster at night," Francesco Rizzato, Technical Analyst, OpenSignal, said in a statement.

When the mobile network is busiest, the average LTE download speed drops 2.8 Mbps compared to the daily average with users in Allahabad experiencing the slowest 4G download speed at 2 Mbps. 

However, when the network is less congested, download speeds jump on average by 10.3 Mbps, with Indore hitting the highest speed of 21.6 Mbps.

"The wide range between a city's fastest hourly speed and the average speed smartphone users experience shows the challenge India's operators face from the need to support a large number of users consuming mobile data services," Rizzato added. 

All the cities witness speeds that tend to decrease over the course of the day, and reach the slowest at 10 p.m. when presumably most users are connected to the Internet accessing entertainment services on the mobile. 

With increasing number of people accessing mobile services, cheaper smartphone devices and rising average data consumption per user, mobile operators in the country can expect the number of connected devices and data traffic to continue to soar and network congestion to persist, the OpenSignal report noted.